Hawaa Hawaai

Starring: Partho Gupte, Saqib Saleem, Pragya Yadav
Directed by Amole Gupte
Rating: **

The simple story of a schoolboy without a lunchbox was told with much whimsy by Amole Gupte in Stanley Ka Dabba. What irked was the preachy, sappy end. Hawaa Hawaai starts where that film left, which is precisely its problem. The tale of the young Arjun Harishcha­ndra Waghmare, who works as a helper in the chai shop, gets too predictable right down to the unsurprising and humdrum climax of the underdog winning the day, a motif in every second sports film. The spo­rts here is roller-skating.

There are some nice vignettes of the life and people at the tea shop; Amol Gole’s camera lingers beautifully on their faces and catches their expressions with intim­acy. But the constant juxtaposition of rich against poor kids makes it seem that the film is attempting too hard to tug at our heartstrings.

At times, things get annoyingly sanctimonious and uncomfortably manipulative. The issue at hand may be significant but some old cinematic tropes make things alarmingly grating. The scene of the mother crying copiously over the burnt fingers of the son and he feeding her roti makes you cringe. In fact, the mother cries so much that she reminded me of Leela Chitnis and others of that vintage. The boy seems to face one sorrow after another. The father-son-foster father angle could have been delved with more deftly but isn’t. Despite all the good intentions, the film wallows in its goodness and left me cold by its sheer virtue.